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Male and female births in London

Source: R/data-arbuthnot.R
arbuthnot.Rd

Arbuthnot's data describes male and female christenings (births) for London from 1629-1710.

Usage

arbuthnot

Format

A tbl_df with with 82 rows and 3 variables:

year

year, ranging from 1629 to 1710

boys

number of male christenings (births)

girls

number of female christenings (births)

Source

These data are excerpted from the Arbuthnot dataset in the HistData package.

Details

John Arbuthnot (1710) used these time series data to carry out the first known significance test. During every one of the 82 years, there were more male christenings than female christenings. As Arbuthnot wondered, we might also wonder if this could be due to chance, or whether it meant the birth ratio was not actually 1:1.

Examples


library(ggplot2)
library(tidyr)

# All births
ggplot(arbuthnot, aes(x = year, y = boys + girls, group = 1)) +
  geom_line()


# Boys and girls
arbuthnot |>
  pivot_longer(cols = -year, names_to = "sex", values_to = "n") |>
  ggplot(aes(x = year, y = n, color = sex, group = sex)) +
  geom_line()